


Into The Unknown

by Control_Room, Random_ag



Series: Tortured Tales [16]
Category: Bendy and the Ink Machine
Genre: Crushes, Fluff, IN SPACE!, Minor panic, Multi, Portals, The Magicks Of Science, The Vacuum Of Space, and they were roomates, science gone wrong
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:56:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27679078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Control_Room/pseuds/Control_Room, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Random_ag/pseuds/Random_ag
Summary: Invention broken down to the skeletal frame behind it.
Relationships: Joey Drew/Joey Drew, Sticks and Log
Series: Tortured Tales [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2023520





	Into The Unknown

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Halfus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Halfus/gifts), [ObscureLog](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=ObscureLog).



“You need to design something before you build it, though.”

“But if you have no materials, what’s the point of designing? You need someone to put it into reality!”

“And just _what_ will you put into reality if you don't know what it looks like?”

“Uh. You make it up as you go! Like this!”

Joy harnessed the power vested in him and created an interestingly shaped object. She frowned. 

“It was supposed to be a frog.” 

Magenta snorted, and ruffled his roommate’s hair. 

“I think you did better than other people would have, mechie.”

“Hey, don’t call me a mechie, you, you,” Joy pursed her lips and put his hands on his hips. “You desi!”

“Desi!?” Magenta could not hold in his smile. “The word is ‘designer’.”

“And the word is mechanic!”

“Still, without me, what would you mechanize?”

“My _own_ designs.”

“Well, you wouldn’t make a bad designer, I think,” Magenta remarked thoughtfully. “But you still are designing to bring it into the world.”

Joy pouted: “Still-- you can't design without knowing what you're gonna use, can you?”

“Technically, you can,” Johan, coming in through the wall, said. Both Joy and Magenta looked away as he walked through, being that his class was a quite literal distortion of the world as we know it. 

“Our theorist has arrived,” Magenta called in a joking revere, once he stopped covering his eyes. “How’d you come in this time?”

“Direct wormhole f-from classroom.”

“Damn.”

“Damn indeed,” Johan agreed, still trying to wrap his mind around the day’s lesson. “What’s all this about? Was that s-supposed to be a frog? It excellently captures the mechanics, th-though the design is a little flawed.”

“Told you,” Joy triumphantly folded her arms. “I got this.”

“Sure,” Magenta rolled his eyes. “You _totally_ do.”

“Was that sarcastic?” Joy demanded, eyes flashing. She wagged a finger. “It better not have been.”

“Noo, of course not!” Magenta gasped, overly dramatic. “You very much have got this, Joy.”

“Glad to hear you think so,” she chipperly replied, and turned to Johan. “So, what do you think? Which is more important, mechanics or design?”

“I believe all the c-classes are equally important,” Johan answered, a little surprised. “We’re just divided according t-to our aptitude.” 

“Well, you’re just saying that because the quantum class is the smallest,” Magenta pointed out. Johan looked at him quizzically, and Joy added; “Well going by that, mechanics are the most important because we’re the biggest! Mechanics is better!”

“Design!”

“Mechanics!”

“Design!”

“Um, guys, we’re all together for a r-reason,” Johan resisted the urge to bite his lip. “So that we learn how to better each others s-skills and our own, r-right?”

“Uh, no, it's so that we keep the competition in our heads,” Joy told him. “Duh! The class with the highest score--”

“Highest average,” Johan corrected quietly. “So that the classes that are smaller have an equal chance. And yes, I know that the one w-with the highest score wins a trip to a place of their choice.”

“And so far, design is winning,” Magenta smirked, waving with a flourish at their room’s point meter. In their room, Magenta had the highest number of points gained for his class, then Joy was close behind (the two swapped constantly), and finally Johan was at about half of the other two. The totals for the teams were above each of their names, and Magenta was correct. Joy giggled; “But not by much! Just fifteen points ahead! And if I submit this frog,” she delicately picked it up, “I’ll boost the score. Watch.”

She pressed her name and then the submit button on the meter, and a scanning device opened. Johan and Magenta watched as the point meter went up twenty points. Joy spun around, grinning. 

“Beat that!”

“Oh, I will,” Magenta assured him, and pulled out a blueprint paper from his glove. Closing his eyes, he visualized a machine and jotted it down. He fed it to the point meter, and his points rose-- along with his teams. “See.”

“You got anything up your sleeve, Jo?” Joy asked the quietest one in the room. Johan shook his head. “Well, that’s okay! Mag and me will just keep going at this.”

“Yes,” Magenta agreed, already working on another design. “Joy, do you want to do a collaborative one? You design, and I’ll build.”

“That would be fun!” Joy beamed. “Let’s do it!”

Johan smiled at the two and went into the kitchen to work on his homework-- cooking with a devil’s fork and by using pressure instead of heat. After ten minutes, Joy and Magenta looked over at the kitchen where a hysterical shout was heard, both glancing at each other and then continuing. Johan having breakdowns over his work was regular. All the quantums did. Joy passed Magenta the drawing of the robotic cat, and Magenta nodded, and asked for the parts, which Joy gave him. Soon, they watched it walking around the room, both of them smiling happily, and behind them Johan burst across the room with a bang. Joy and Magenta turned around to stare at him, his blue hair with some bits of sparks in them, his eyes dazed and dizzy. The cat Joy and Magenta created walked over to him and nuzzled his smoke covered face.

Joy and Magenta burst into laughing. Johan flushed under the ash.

“You guys think th-that theorists have it so easy, don’t you, just c-cause we have less homework and t-textbooks, huh?” he questioned after wiping his glasses, folding his arms and getting up by shifting the gravity beneath him. “It’s n-not easy at all! My mind feels like it’s g-gonna melt every day….”

“Puh-lease, it can’t be that bad,” Magenta patted his shoulder with an eye roll, and Johan stiffened and relaxed, both at once. “I bet me and Joy could make something from your theoretical doohickey stuff without melting our brains. Joy and I will… will build a portal!”

“We will?” Joy asked, then excitement furled her hands into balls, a grin squishing her cheeks and making her eyes shine. “We will! Yeah! We can make a portal together!”

“Well, um,” Johan, startled into submission, mumbled, “Good luck with that.”

He went to his part of the room and got under his blanket, feeling a little weird inside. He was proud of his roommates; after all, they both were the highest scorers for each of their classes, but felt strange at the way they just decided to create a portal. Johan was not the greatest theorist, and struggled with objects like portals. He had to admit that the feeling was… in the right terms, it was ‘scholarly envy’. Johan’s teacher spoke about it often, and said it was not a bad feeling if it brought the person to learn more and strive for their best. He rolled over to look at Magenta and Joy, watching them build, his eyes more on the people than the creation.

Joy was so sweet, and amazing at bringing to life everything she wanted. It was incredible to watch her snap into being all sorts of creations, from bugs to frogs to cats and dogs-- Joy often said her specialty was the living world. She had a remarkable eye for the flow of matter, and executed each one of her ideas wonderfully.

Magenta, on the other hand, was a master of the lines, the shapes, the delicate equilibrium hidden inside the simplest of things. His designs were loud and sketched, strong and clearly defined. He often requested to work with a mechanic that could handle a lot of work, and rarely was satisfied, but when he was, his contentment was always accompanied by a brilliant ecstatic smile.

And Johan? Well, he tried. He melted his brain making devil's forks a hellish reality.

Yep. That was about it. The life of a quantum was never an easy one-- especially when the class’s lecture would turn to the philosophical debate of what life was, which was concluded to be relative to each individual at any given moment.

“Jo, check it out,” Magenta got his attention, snapping him out of his reflexing trance to redirect his eyes onto a human sized device with a massive amount of wires and portcullises. He squinted, trying to understand it, and sat up to analyze it. “What do you think?”

“Er--” Johan tilted his head. “Um, it looks like a portal, I guess, in s-some worlds.”

“Wanna fire it up?” Joy asked, excitement dazzling the other two. Magenta shook his head to clear it and then nodded: “Sure! Let’s go!”

Johan tried to object for the briefest of moments there, unsure of the brand new creation's safety, but then fell silent. The other two had spent time and effort in building that portal, and they deserved a chance to try it out.

Joy pulled a lever (the right lever) and Magenta turned a nozzle. The machine hummed to life with a low buzzing that slowly got louder with every passing minute. Johan’s passive face slowly turned to a slight scowl of concern, lips parting in a frown and brow furrowing. 

“That’s not a sound a portal sh-should make,” he said, getting off of his bed. “That’s a--”

He could not finish his words, for at that moment, the vacuum flared on. Magenta and Joy barely had time to shout as the machine seemed to inhale them into its human shaped maw with incredible force. Johan, being flung into the air, smacked his face against the fan, his glasses flying into the abyss, but he managed to grasp the stable object, his legs numb with the intense pull the device snared on him. 

His mind began thinking before he could even understand that he was indeed doing so: the portal lead to the vacuum of space, Magenta and Joy had been sucked in the portal, the human body only survives three minutes in space without a helmet and suit (as he had learned in his last school trip to the empty interstellar void), Magenta and Joy were indeed human or not, but even if Magenta did not need air, he still was quite likely to catch on fire or boil alive.

No big deal.

He had three minutes to get Magenta and Joy back before they cooked in their own skin.

Fun!

First things first, go through and deactivate the portal.

He let go, and slammed a hand onto the valve Joy had pulled, nearly losing it as it closed behind him, as he exhaled as hard as he could.

Check. 

Locate Magenta and Joy in under twenty seconds.

He could already feel his skin heating, and he swapped it with air, propelling himself along through the heat, for heat was naught but energy. 

He spotted the bright pink bow tie first, and forced himself to increase his velocity, clocking it in his head as he rushed through dark matter. His vision pulsed and darkened and he increased the amount of null energy there was around him, using it to sustain himself. Barely. He grabbed Magenta’s hand, the man swelling from the intense lack of pressure. Joy could not be faring any better. Johan quickly visualized where the other must have been, projected them to the location, and pulled her into the safety of his arms, the poor round being looking positively terrible. Well, in her defense, they were in a goddamn vacuum. Living conditions weren't exactly optimal.

Now came the hard part. 

Johan closed his eyes and concentrated. He was back in their room. He was back in their room, with Magenta and Joy. They were all on his bed, together, safe. 

He opened his eyes slowly, and inhaled, choking on _air_. 

“Holy fucking hell,” he gasped, relieved, and his arms tightened around the normalizing bodies of his roommates.

Magenta’s eyes snapped open first, and he gripped his head.

“Your class sucks,” he wheezed. Joy groaned, and nodded in agreement.

At the moment, Johan could care less.


End file.
